William Rice, former Tribune food and wine journalist, dies at 77

William Rice was a food and wine journalist whose urbane writing for various publications, including the Chicago Tribune for 17 years, combined expert knowledge with an unassuming approachability that appealed to home cooks and some of the world's top chefs. He died Sunday at 77.

"Bill was a consummate professional, an inquisitive and inventive reporter and writer who helped pioneer food and wine journalism at the Chicago Tribune. Bill was one of the pillars of our Good Eating section, which reinvented the genre at the Tribune," former Tribune Editor Gerould W. Kern said in a statement. "His deep personal experience in cooking and tasting gave us great credibility and connection with our readers. His work anticipated and helped accelerate the widespread interest in fine cuisine in Chicago. In many ways, he prepared the way."

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"Even more, he was a wonderful colleague, and it was a pleasure to share his company," added Kern, a one-time deputy managing editor for features who worked with Rice. "He will be greatly missed."

A private memorial service will take place in early June, his widow, Jill Van Cleave, a food industry consultant and cookbook author, wrote in an email Wednesday.

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Rice brought a "measured, thoughtful all-encompassing approach to food," said chef Bruce Sherman, of Chicago's North Pond restaurant. "He's just so smart and wise and considerate of the field and of the people and of life."

"Bill was certainly very confident about his own judgment on things," said Elin McCoy, the Kent, Conn.-based wine and spirits columnist for Bloomberg News, who worked for Rice when he was editor of Food & Wine magazine in the early 1980s. "He wasn't someone who jumped on bandwagons because everybody else did. He was not afraid to say something was important before anyone else."

"He was a faultlessly decent person and colleague with a nifty and sly sense of humor," wrote James Warren, a former Tribune managing editor for features, in an email. "Professionally, he was a path-breaking food and wine writer with an uncommon mix of refined and populist sensibilities. Here was a guy on a first-name basis with many of the world's great chefs who could also crank out pieces for me on the best cheap wine to have with takeout Chinese food."

Rice started at the Chicago Tribune on June 30, 1986, after high-profile stints at Food & Wine magazine and, in the 1970s, as food editor of The Washington Post.

Phil Vettel, the Tribune's longtime restaurant reviewer, said Rice's hire was viewed as a "major get" for the Tribune. Those in the city's food circles agreed.

"It was seen as a feather in our cap that this man would come to Chicago and see the potential of what we wanted to do," said Ina Pinkney, the veteran restaurateur and Tribune dining columnist. "I think he saw what was coming. He knew we were made of better stuff and wanted to be a part of it."

Judith Dunbar Hines, formerly the city's director of culinary arts and events, said Rice was a known entity in Chicago because of his prior career. He brought with him a "broader viewpoint," she said, and "a sense of sophistication and professionalism. … An awful lot of what was being written here was home ec-y. He brought a more sophisticated sound."

Warren, who is now chief media writer for Poynter, said Rice's hire by the Tribune "was reflective of a desire to raise the paper's game, but coincidently it came on the verge of a dramatic maturation of the whole food scene in Chicago."

"It was just unusual for a guy to make a move from the mecca of fine dining to Chicago," said Warren, referring to the shift from New York. Chicago "simply wasn't that sophisticated" at the time, he said.

The biographical listing in Marquis Who's Who notes William Edward Rice was born in Albany, N.Y., on July 26, 1938, the son of Harry E. and Elizabeth (Lally) Rice. He grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., but fell in love with the Virginia countryside on a visit to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello at age 11, his wife said. He graduated from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in history. A stint in the Navy followed. He earned a master's degree in 1963 from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

Rice was hired by The Washington Post and worked there until 1969, according to biographical materials compiled by Rice in the 1980s. He wrote editorials, reported, edited and, the records note, "undertook a two-year assignment as the newspaper's first restaurant critic."

In 1969, Rice moved to France. Craig Claiborne, the enormously influential food editor of The New York Times, had encouraged him to enroll in the famed Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, Rice later wrote. Claiborne himself checked in on Rice and shared what he found with Times readers.

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"If you see a young man swinging a knapsack full of pots and pans and cutlery along the banks of the Seine, it may well be an American named William Rice en route to a cooking session in the house of a friend or friends," Claiborne wrote in a story that ran on April 23, 1970, complete with two photographs of the young Rice and three recipes. "Mr. Rice is doing his thing in Paris (and Europe) this year — a thing that scores of his countrymen would doubtless like to do, but very few have the courage to do."

What Rice did was clean out his savings account, Claiborne wrote, and move to Paris to "learn about la bonne vie — the cooking, wines and restaurants in France." He took classes in French and cooking — earning a certificate from Le Cordon Bleu, worked with an Alsatian-born baker and spent "considerable time in the vineyards."

Rice's decision to write about food and go to France and study cooking was an unorthodox move for a male journalist of that era, McCoy said.

"He loved food and he loved wine. That was his total passion," she said. "What made him unusual in the food and wine world at the time was he started as a reporter, and as a reporter he had a different view because everything he saw in the food and wine world was as a reporter."

Rice returned to the Washington area. His Who's Who entry for 1971 and 1972 lists him as director of a cooking school in Bethesda, Md., and as freelance writer and restaurant critic for Washingtonian magazine.

He returned to The Washington Post as food editor in 1972 and remained until 1980. He initiated wine coverage in The Post's Sunday Magazine with a column called "Rice on Wine."

McCoy said America's food scene was shifting just as Rice was honing his reportorial skills on the topic. He brought a nose for news and what was important, she noted. He also had a reporter's sense of skepticism and wasn't one to gush. Rice, she said, would also defer to others if he thought you knew what you were doing.

"On the other hand, if there was something he felt strongly about he'd say, 'Let's do it.' He had really good ideas about what was au courant," she said.

Rice's sojourn as editor-in-chief of Food & Wine was relatively short. A June 12, 1985, story on Rice published by the Daily News of McKeesport, Pa., just two weeks after his departure, said Rice and the magazine's owners "could not agree on the editorial direction the magazine should take." The decision to part was a mutual one, according to both McCoy and Van Cleave.

A year later, in 1986, Rice was in Chicago. Why the move? Van Cleave said that Rice was having trouble adjusting to the freelance life in New York after leaving Food & Wine.

Van Cleave was a Chicagoan who had moved to New York to be with Rice. The pair had first met in 1978 at an Oregon cooking school where she was an assistant teacher. Rice was then the Post food editor and married to his first wife, she said.

"He had the kindest, sweetest face I have ever seen,'' Van Cleave recalled. "There was a warmth in his eyes and he was so without pretense. He didn't think what he was doing was a big deal as food editor of The Washington Post. To us, at the cooking school, he was a big deal. He was a nice guy. He knew a lot about food and wine. We talked about Oregon wine and he asked me what I thought."

"You know how it is, you get talking," Van Cleave added. "I liked him. I just liked him. … A couple of years later, I found out he was separated and I got in contact with him."

Three years later, Van Cleave wanted to move back to Chicago from New York. Rice was agreeable. Van Cleave said her husband called a good friend at The New York Times, R.W. Apple Jr., to inquire if there might be a job opening, preferably in food, at the Chicago Tribune. Apple, she recalled, told him not to worry — he'd take care of it. And Apple did, she said.

"He said he made a couple of calls for Bill. He was wonderful about finding openings for people," she recalled by telephone from her Georgetown home in Washington, D.C.

Paul Camp, the Tribune's features editor at the time, recalls that then-editor Jim Squires "wanted someone of Bill's quality and knowledge as part of the food writing team, and Bill was interested in a change. It came together quickly, and suddenly there was Bill."

Camp described Rice as "a great addition" to the Tribune staff, a reporter who could move beyond the food in question to the story behind the food, a story that made the food even more interesting.

"Never in my time did he deliver a piece to the editors that wasn't meticulously researched, brilliantly told as a story and virtually perfect writing," Camp said.

Rice's work at the Tribune helped wake Chicago up to all of its possibilities, Van Cleave said.

"Everybody in Chicago knew about Le Francais, everybody knew about Le Perroquet but that was about it,'' she said, referring to two famed restaurants that helped change dining expectations of that era. "Bill liked to uncover the things people were overlooking. He liked finding the gems people were not really seeing. He'd find some good ones. He really did put Charlie Trotter on the map."

"Someone like Bill knew everybody in the industry. He could pick up the telephone and talk to anyone," Camp said, noting that Rice's national stature meant that whatever he wrote about Trotter and other innovative Chicago chefs was taken very seriously.

Rice, his wife recalled, would find the "really meaningful things about the people, the food and the place." He knew, she said, "how to go for the essence of something."

Warren agreed, writing in his email that Rice "discovered talent and new cuisines from around the country long before food and chefs became glamorized on TV. It's hard to imagine today, but it wasn't that long ago that intrepid souls like Bill started telling the world about the glories of California wines or simply grilled fish."

Rice, who was not the Tribune's restaurant critic and thus not bound by a need for anonymity, was able to work, to collaborate, face-to-face with famous chefs like Trotter, Jean Joho, Gabino Sotelino and others, Vettel said.

"We worked on a story about steakhouses. They knew who he was, but they didn't know me," Vettel remembered. "It was quite extraordinary to watch the respect and deference they showed Bill."

Pinkney vividly remembers when Rice visited her then-new restaurant and told readers about it being one of the best new breakfast spots in a century. It wasn't a review, but that didn't matter to her.

"For me, I felt I had arrived because Bill Rice understood what I was doing, complimented me on what I was doing and wrote about me," Pinkney said. "He knew his stuff. You never doubted he knew his stuff. I was blown away by his kindness."

Rice "opened doors" to Chicagoans, Sherman said, broadening the dining experience beyond the usual meat and potatoes. He brought to Chicago a "knowledge and sophistication about what food is and how diverse, how international, it could be," the chef said.

Sherman says he would have been "nowhere" without Rice. He was in Paris in 1997, wondering what to do next and where. He says Patricia Wells, the Milwaukee-born and Paris-based cooking teacher, cookbook author and restaurant critic, pointed him to Chicago — and to Rice.

"She had worked with him and had the utmost respect for him," recalled Sherman, who said Rice was one of the first people he contacted upon arriving in Chicago. "He understood the position I was looking for. He had a wisdom you just don't find today."

And Rice's wisdom extended from food to wine.

Camp said Rice's wine writing was accessible and provided "a light touch" to a subject that had been "hit or miss" in the Tribune. "You came away from one of Bill's articles thinking, 'I'd like to try that.' He wrote so vividly about it and so passionately and he often related it to food," Camp noted.

"He was so well-respected for his wine knowledge," agreed Carol Mighton Haddix, a former Tribune food editor. "I remember he'd come up on the weekend to taste wine, fill the counters in the test kitchen with bottles and just go through them. I don't know how he could taste that much, but he did."

Rice retired from the Tribune in December 2003. He was author of "Feasts of Wine and Food," (1986) and "Steak Lover's Cookbook" (1997). He was co-editor of three editions of "Where to Eat in America," first published in 1977.

His ability and achievements were recognized over the years. Rice's biographical records note that he was made a chevalier of the Ordre du Merite Agricole by the French government in 1983. He was inducted into "Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America" in 1984, the inaugural year for a program now managed by the James Beard Foundation. He would later serve as chairman of the Who's Who committee from 2005 to 2008. He was also named in 1993 to the foundation's restaurant awards committee and served as chairman from 1994 to 2003, according to a Beard Foundation spokeswoman.

Locally, Rice was also inducted into the Oyster Hall of Fame at Shaw's Crab House in Chicago. And such was his passion for steak that Gibsons Bar & Steakhouse named its 22-ounce prime Angus beef cut, W.R.'s Chicago Cut. It remains with the same title on the menu to this day — a delicious salute to Rice's legacy.

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Amid the accolades, Rice kept it low-key, personable.

"He wore his expertise lightly," Vettel said. "He wasn't a pedant. He didn't sit on high and explain how things work. Everything with Bill was a conversation. He was generous with his time."

The glories of simple food well-executed was never lost on William Rice. A roast chicken, perfectly rendered, was his favorite food — and the topic both of his first column published in the Tribune's Sunday magazine in 1986 and his last published in 2004. Here's his recipe.

1 chicken, free-range preferred, about 2 3/4 pounds

1/2 teaspoon each salt and freshly ground pepper

Dijon-style mustard

1. Heat a conventional oven or outdoor grill to 400 degrees (or a convection oven to 375 degrees). Remove giblets package from cavity and reserve for stock or other uses. Wash the chicken and pat it dry.

2. Season the cavity with salt and pepper. Rub mustard all over the chicken's exterior and season liberally with salt and pepper.

3. Position the chicken on a rack in a roasting pan, breast side up. Place in the oven. Cook for 55 minutes. Remove from oven and test fleshy part of leg with an instant-read thermometer. If it reads 150 degrees or higher, transfer to a cutting board and cover loosely with a tent of foil wrap and let rest for 10 minutes. (If the temperature is less than 150, return chicken to the oven for an additional 10 minutes.)

4. Cut two wing pieces (with some breast meat attached) from the bird. Cut away legs and divide into thighs and drumsticks. Remove backbone and the two "oysters." Carve white meat from breast bone or cut the breast pieces away and slice into pieces on the cutting board.

Flavor the bird: Place a sprig or two of fresh tarragon, rosemary or thyme in the cavity. Alternatively, use a cut lemon or three or four lightly crushed cloves of garlic.

Truss the bird: The easiest method is to tuck the wing tips under the body, wrap string around the wing joints like reins for a horse and use the ends of the string to wrap and tie the legs close to the body.

An alternate method for cooking the bird: Start the chicken breast down; after 15 minutes, turn it on its left side; after 30, on its right; after 45, breast up.